attached bearing the name of the donor in distinctly legible characters.
Old man Hagerman has been mowing all the rag-weed and cuckle-burrs along
the line of march, and the lawns have had an unusual amount of shaving
and sprinkling. Out near the end of Center Street, the grandstand has
been going up, tiers of seats rising from each curb line. The street has
been rolled and sprinkled and scraped until it is in fine condition for
a running track. Why don't you pick up that pebble and throw it over
into the lot? Suppose some runner should slip on that stone and fall and
hurt himself, you'd be to blame.

The day before the Tournament, they hang the banner:

"WELCOME VOLUNTEER FIREMEN"

from Case's drugstore across to the Furniture Emporium. Along the line
of march you may see the man of the house up on a step-ladder against
the front porch, with his hands full of drapery and his mouth full of
tacks. His wife is backing toward the geranium bed to get a good view,
cocking her head on one side.

"How 'v vif?" he asks as well as he can for the tacks.

"Little higher. Oh, not so much. Down a little. Whope! that's .... Oh,
plague take the firemen! Just look at that! Mercy! Mercy!"

The man of the house can't turn his head.

"Oh, I wouldn't have had it happen for I don't know what! Ts! Ts! Ts!
That lovely silverleaf geranium that Mrs. Pritchard give me a slip of.
Broke right off! Oh, my! My! My! Do you s'pose it'd grow if I was to
stick it into the ground just as it is with all them buds on it?"

The man of the house lets one end of the drapery go and empties his
mouth of tacks into his disengaged hand.

"I don't know. Ow! jabbed right into my gum! But I can tell you this:
If you think I'm going to stick up on this ladder all morning while you
carry on about some fool old geranium that you can just as well fuss
with when I'm gone, why, you're mighty much mistaken."

"Well, you needn't take my head off. I feel awful about that geranium."

"Well, why don't you look where you're going? Is this right?"

"Yes, I told you. I wish now I'd done it myself. I can't ask you to do a
thing about the house but there's a row raised right away."

People that don't want to go to the trouble of tacking up these alphabet
flags on the edge of the veranda eaves (it takes fourteen of them to
spell "WELCOME FIREMEN"), say they think a handsome flag--a really
handsome one, not one of these twenty-five centers--is as pretty and
rich